Abstract

One of the most general image based object representations is the Light Field. Unfortunately, a large amount of data is required to reconstruct high quality views from a Light Field. In this paper, we present the wavelet stream which employs non-standard four-dimensional wavelet decomposition for Light Field compression. It allows for progressive transmission, storage, and rendering of compressed Light Field data. Our results show that 0.8% of the original coefficients or 0.3 bits per pixel, respectively are sufficient to obtain visually pleasing new views. Additionally, the wavelet stream allows for an adaptive multi-resolution representation of the Light Field data. Furthermore, a silhouette-encoding scheme helps to reduce the number of coefficients required. Our data structure allows to store arbitrary vector-valued data like RGB- or YUV-data. The Light Field data stored in the wavelet stream can be decompressed in real time for interactive rendering. For this, the reconstruction algorithm uses supplementary caching schemes.

Amir Said and William A. Pearlman. A new fast and efficient image codec based on set partitioning in hierarchical trees. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 6:243–250, June 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar